Sunday 14 March 2004 11.33 EST
First published on Sunday 14 March 2004 11.33 EST

Like most of the men in the Cumbrian town of Flookburgh, Ian McClure has fished all his life: for shrimps, for mussels and for cockles. His father and grandfather made a living that way, and over there, wrestling with his oilskins, is his son. 'We know these sands like the back of our hands,' he says, squinting out across the bay. 'It's bred in us. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. But don't get me wrong. You can use the same tracks for weeks and then, all of a sudden, water will come in off the marshes and undermine the sand. When that happens, you just have to get off the sands as best you can.' He gives me a sharp look. 'We lose two tractors a year.' Impossible to judge whether this last statement is a warning, or a boast.

McClure has spent the past six hours picking cockles on the now infamously treacherous sands of Morecambe Bay where, as the locals like to tell you, the flood tide rushes in with the speed of 'a fine horse'. Today has been a good day. For one thing, the watery winter sun has been shining (although conditions are still ruthlessly unforgiving - the wind, which is ravenous, seems to work its way deep into your very bone marrow). For another, the catch is magnificent: 45 bags in all, each one weighing 25 kilos. Like any Morecambe Bay cockler, McClure comes over all coy when I ask him how much he has made. Later, however, I work it out for myself. This week, the market price for cockles is 60p a kilo; if my sums are right, the roll of notes I see him stuff in his pocket should come to nearly £675.

But there are, of course, days when he works for hours and comes back with next to nothing. It is, moreover, labour of the hardest kind: dangerous, backbreaking and so tough on the skin that even the youngest men are far beyond the stage when moisturiser - even the sort supposedly favoured by their Norwegian colleagues - might afford them any benefit. They have faces the colour and texture of burnt bacon. 'Brute force and ignorance is what it takes,' says McClure, with a laugh. 'Your hands end up like leather. You take a sandwich and a flask, but if it's that cold and wet and blowing a bloody gale, you don't stop all day because you just want to get off. It's like being married. The first 20 years are bloody hard, but thou gets used to it.'

It is a long time since I have heard anyone use the word 'thou' but then, almost everything about cockling feels as if it belongs to another age. As the sun finally kisses us goodbye, I watch the 200 men who have been working the sands roll off the bay. At this hour there is an eerie moonscape, all mysterious shadows and glittering craters. The cocklers make their way to Hest Bank where their cars sit beside the line of refrigerated white vans awaiting the catch. Swap their tractors and quad bikes for horses and donkeys (which did not, incidentally, become extinct until the 1960s on some cockle beaches), and the scene might have come straight out of Hardy. The men, who travel in trailers like refugees, are dumb with exhaustion. They carry peculiar wooden tools. Once they have been paid, they will head straight for the nearest public house and a pint of best bitter.

There used to be at least 20 cockling families in Flookburgh; now there are just a handful and most of the labour is casual (although, as a result of recent events, immigrant workers are suddenly a rarity). Ironic, then, that thanks to demand from the Continent, there is more money than ever in shellfish. In the winter, the Morecambe cockle beds, which are licensed by the Environment Agency, are worked every day of the week, for as many hours as the tide is out and the light is good. 'The season lasts for as long as the beds are kept open,' says McClure. 'Sometimes they're closed to stop over-fishing.' Is it over-fishing that makes his haul so unpredictable? 'No, it's a cycle, same way you get tonnes of damsons on a tree one year, and none the next.' He smiles. He doesn't really understand my interest. McClure is not much of a one for cockles himself. His wife's potted shrimps are more his thing. 'I used to eat cockles as a kid. But it's like working in a toffee shop. You don't like toffees after you've been with them all day.'

Until last month, when the terrible news came that 20 Chinese migrant workers had drowned in Morecambe Bay, most people knew next to nothing about the British cockle industry which, in this part of the North West alone, is estimated to be worth £7m a year (The Shellfish Association thinks the overall UK harvest is worth £20m). But it was not only the relative value of these gritty, unprepossessing molluscs that raised eyebrows. In particular, it was hard to believe that, in modern Britain, cockles are still harvested in so primitive a manner, with creaky old rakes and griddles. Surely there was another, more efficient way. Why couldn't they be farmed, like oysters, or grown on ropes, like mussels?

The truth is that there is another, more efficient way: dredging, which is how cockles are gathered in the Wash and the Thames estuary. Alas, the vast vacuum cleaners involved in this process gobble up every cockle in their path, however small, with the result that stocks deplete too rapidly. In the other major cockling areas, therefore, cockles are picked precisely as they were in the nineteenth century and before - by hand. In the Dee estuary in Scotland, and in Morecambe, cocklers must have permits to go on the sands, which are regularly closed in order to give the poor cockle a chance to reproduce itself. In the Burry estuary in Wales, there are 55 licensed gatherers, each of whom works to a quota.

Cockling, as befits so ancient a practice, has its own vocabulary, some of which is still in use. First, the cockler puts down and 'rocks' his 'jumbo' - a long plank of wood with a handle at either end of it that softens the sand and sucks the cockles to the surface. The shells are then gathered using a rake and riddled (sorted) so that the smallest cockles fall through and go back onto the beds. Iron forks with three curved prongs, called craams, are sometimes used to scoop the cockles out of the sand. In the old days, when women and children made up the majority of the workforce, the cockles were then put into baskets known as tiernals; cocklers now tend to use something somewhat less picturesque, usually a nylon bag.

As for the cockle itself, what a busy little bivalve it is. The common cockle, which is what Molly Malone was selling when she called 'Cockles and mussels, alive alive-oh' in the streets of Dublin, is Cerastoderma edule . It can be found everywhere from the Barents Sea and the Baltic to the Mediterranean and Senegal; a rich cockle bed may contain more than a million of the molluscs to the acre.

The best British cockles are generally held to be the Stiffkey (pronounced stookey) Blues from Norfolk, which owe their bewitching colour to the anaerobic mud in which they like to live. But you would be hard-pressed to find these or any other kind of fresh cockle - as opposed to one pickled to within an inch of its life - in a British seaside town. These days, shamefully, cockles are something that only foreigners eat. Once upon a time, however, they were a traditional British food, genuinely loved and sought-after, especially in the East End of London, where they can still be found in jars on many a bar, and in Wales (as Alan Davidson points out in his magisterial Oxford Companion to Food, it is the Welsh who have the widest range of cockle recipes, including Cocos ac wyau - better known as cockles and eggs).

So, in the dead of night, our cockles are dispatched abroad, to Holland and Belgium, to France and Spain - countries that have overfished their own beds and must now look elsewhere for supplies. At teatime, the middle-men, who come from the likes of Liverpool and Southampton, pick up the freshly caught produce straight from the cocklers. They then drive to the coast, where they pick up an overnight ferry. In the morning, they sell the contents of their vans to the Continental middle-men, who purify and pack the shellfish in EU-approved premises. Finally, the goods are sold on to fish markets and supermarkets, where they are bought by fishmongers, restaurateurs and housewives. Along the way, most deals are brokered so swiftly that those involved barely exchange more than three words. Where cockles are concerned, time is of the essence.

Terry Lankford, who began life as a fisherman, is now the proud director of Lankford & Sons, a Southampton company which trades in British shellfish (cockles in the winter, whelks in summer). Does it sadden him that so much of his produce goes abroad? 'Oh, yes. Very much. But people here just haven't the appreciation. I could take you to a lorry drivers' café in France, and you'd be given oysters. Here, you'd get egg and chips. Cockles, people just smother in salt, pepper and vinegar.' He sighs, wistfully. 'You should see the processing plants out in Brittany. Amazing! There's nothing like that here at all. It's like the Dark Ages!'

The cockles that do stay in this country are doused in vinegar and sold in jars. 'We sell 2.5m jars of cockles a year,' says Rory Parsons of Parsons' Pickles, which was founded by his father in Wales in 1947. 'They go to shops, pubs and chippies.' Like many others, he was badly affected by the Food Standards Agency's decision last year, to close cockle fisheries in the Thames, the Wash and the Burry Inlet after toxins were found (the Agency has recently been censured by MPs for the foolhardiness of its decision). He would like to see cockles restored to their rightful place at the British table - for all that his own are pickled. 'There's a hard core of people who like them,' he says. 'Others just wrinkle their noses. I think cockles might have an image problem.'

As a girl, I remember being taken to the Castle Market in Sheffield, where my father liked to buy prawns. It was there, by way of a challenge, that I tried my very first cockle - a swollen orange bogey of a thing that tasted of Sarson's and stagnant rock pool. Dreadful creature! Later, in my twenties, my friend Philippa and I ended up at an event that I believe was known as the North Shields Wet Fish Festival (just don't ask). Considering ourselves ever-so-foodie we bought a polystyrene tub of cockles, which we ate in the rain with one of those little little wooden two-pronged forks. There was so much sand in them that, as I ingested, I began to feel like a giant mollusc myself.

Trying to find a proper plate of cockles in this country is a challenge; in Morecambe, a town that needs a shot of civic Prozac, I could not even find a decent-looking (or open) chip shop. Roughly speaking, the places that do sell cockles fall into two camps: rickety caravans that sell piles of cockles in vinegar; and a few (a very few) upmarket, ultra-fashionable joints that are in the business of reinventing British food. You search in vain for the kind of homely, middle-of-the road place - with red-checked tablecloths - that you might find at a French holiday resort. As one chef I spoke to put it: 'I dream of going to Norfolk and finding a little hut that serves seafood so fresh it jumps off the plate. But the reality is you can't even buy a boiled crab in Cromer, let alone a plate of cockles.'

One of the few places that does have cockles on its menu is St John Bread & Wine in Spitalfields, east London, and it was here that I was finally converted to the cause of the cockle. Karl Goward, the restaurant's head chef, gets his cockles from the Gower peninsula and from Norfolk, and they are cooked with bacon and leeks and served on lava bread, as is the way in Wales (lava is edible seaweed). Goward loves cockles, and insists he would put them on the menu even if they didn't sell - which they do, apparently, St John's clientele being so discerning. The only trouble is that (yes, you guessed it) they are not always available; so many of them disappear across the Channel before he can get his hands on them.

So, how to render the edible cockle truly, well, edible? 'How much grit is in them depends on where they come from and what they've been feeding on,' says Goward. 'But the best way to get rid of it is to rinse them under cold, running water for as long as possible. I try to leave mine for two or three hours. After that, we steam them, the same way we would moules, with white vegetables, leeks, celery, fennel, garlic and onions, some diced bacon, and a little white wine or cider, until they pop open. We then put the liquor through a very fine sieve, just to be sure that all the grit has gone. We serve them out of their shells, on lava bread, with the liquor, the vegetables and the bacon. We're lucky. Cockles provoke strong opinions in people, but our customers really do like them.'

Goward thinks he may have a solution to the humble cockle's image problem, and wonders whether we shouldn't simply rename it, so as to dupe people into thinking it is the same as the pretty little vongole they scoffed with a bowl of spaghetti on holiday: step forward the British clam. Such a move would not be inaccurate. Since the name is derived from the verb to clam, strictly speaking it can be used to refer to any bivalve that can close its hinged shell. Then again, the sad truth is that most people just hate bivalves, be they called cockles or clams. If you are one of these people and regret your timidity, it is worth knowing that Jeffrey Steingarten, the Man Who Ate Everything, used to share your loathing. 'I feel a mild horror about what goes on in the wet darkness between the shells of bivalves,' he wrote in 1989, the year he became food critic of American Vogue . 'Is it their rubbery consistency or their rank subterranean taste, or is the horror deeper than I know?' These days, of course, he can't get enough of the things.